On August 18th, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 16 captured four different storms churning in the skies above North America.
The satellite captured aerial views of hurricanes Grace and Linda, along with tropical storms Fred and Henri. The satellite image also showed swirling billows of smoke streaming across the western U.S. from several major fires in California.
North America is surrounded by 4 storms and wildfire smoke in this satellite view
It was like a lyric from that Rolling Stones song Jumpin’ Jack Flash about being born in a “crossfire hurricane.”
However, I also was thinking of a biblical scripture in Revelation that says:
“And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.”
“You can’t take a picture of reality or freedom , you can’t hold it in your hands, you can’t smell it or taste it –it is something that you have to live through, and understand it psychologically.
It is like love — you know it when you feel it and sometimes it takes work to maintain it. Same goes for empathy –something that is in short supply today and something that we must nurture in order to survive into the future.
For most people, for most practical purposes freedom should be… well, our reality. It’s objective. Material. It actually exists. It exists independent of our beliefs and observations.
Freedom isn’t just an arbitrary, empty signifier that doesn’t actually refer to anything, but it is something which we use, strategically, to contain tyranny.
Freedom does not determine reality — but our reality must include freedom.
Freedom has become nothing more than a magic word rather than something put into practice– because many countries in the world believe that they are free not just Americans.
Canadian citizens have been told they are free. The Japanese think they are too. The very country that we escaped from to get our freedom, the U.K. things that they have freedom. So does France. Italy. Germany. Spain. Australia.
They all celebrate their freedom –there sometime in history they all declared independence form someone or something.
There are 207 sovereign states in the world, 180 of them all claim to be free.”
Back when Ground Zero was in its infancy there was a man I knew named Richard Rounds. I first got to know him as a persistent caller and then after getting to know him, I realized that he had such a remarkable imagination. A lot of his madness was based on how well-read he was.
One night back in the 1990s, I was talking about how creepy I thought Cabbage Patch Dolls were and we got to talking about how these babies looked like mutants from a nuclear facility. We were talking about how they were still everywhere and wondering when the fad was going to wear off and we exchanged a theory that perhaps these dolls were being made by the government in order to prepare young girls for motherhood in the nuclear age.
We were frightened at the idea that these dolls were being made to desensitize us into accepting mutant children as the norm because some 20 or 30 years into the future babies will be born and they would look like cabbage patch kids and they would be exceptionally intelligent.
Well 25 years later there are no mothers forced to raise mutant babies but there was another theory that Richard floated on my show that gave me the creeps.
He once called in and said that he knew fits hand about an underground facility that was hidden in the Rocky Mountains. He said that the whole area is heavily secured in order to protect what was inside.
He said that the facility would be able to withstand any nuclear attack and that in it were important artifacts that were kept hidden away lie what was seen in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There was also a library of microfiche and history records that were kept in rooms that were temperature-controlled and that the personnel there were forbidden to touch them with human hands.
But he added that not only were artifacts stored there but that were also various rooms that he said were like jail cells. They were well furnished but small.
His story then got even weirder when he said that the rooms were set aside for what he called chrononauts – people who would travel between dimensions, many of them were well-known figures of history.
Not just of the past but of the future as well.
He then spoke in the speculative by saying – what if I told you that a future president, Pope, Messiah, and antichrist were held there and that the antichrist and the messiah were playing a strange game of chess by knocking on the walls in code to each other.
He added – what if I told you that both were being held there and that in 25 to 30 years they would be released from the underground facility which would throw the entire world into a kind of paradox?
made it to my radar back in May when Clyde Lewis of Ground Zero devoted a program to the subject:
5/30/18: Q – THE CREATION OF A TECHNOCULT
MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
“After our show with Jason Goodman and Quinn Michaels, we stirred a lot of controversy by implying that perhaps the whole QAnon conspiracy insider phenomenon is an exercise in both human and assisted A.I. disinformation.” (https://www.groundzeromedia.org/5-30-18-q-the-creation-of-a-technocult/)
Last week there were so many Qrazies attending a Trump rally (imagine that…) the so called “Main Street Media” was forced to acknowledge the “movement.” This brings to mind a part of one of the all-time great songs of the sixties, Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie:
“And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in say “Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.”. And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.” https://genius.com/Arlo-guthrie-alices-restaurant-lyrics
The first of August brought a segment on the MSNBC program, All In, hosted by Chris Hayes.
I mention this because Patricia has not been the same since the Trump Crime Family illegally won the election. She usually does not want to spend him time on anything to do with the Trumpster, but she does like Chris Hayes, whom she calls, “The nerdy guy.”
Because of “the nerdy guy’s” facial expressions during the segment I thought she would get a kick out of watching, so I asked her to sit and watch. Fortunately, it did make her laugh…
The next day Chris Matthews did a segment on his Hardball show.
Qanon, an internet conspiracy theory group, showing up at..
The best thing I have yet seen on the subject comes from an interview by Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt with Oxford Scholar Dr. Joseph P. Farrell, the author of the popular Giza Death Star Book Series, who defines below the QAnon phenomenon as, “A Hegelian antithesis to the mainstream media synthesis.”
(https://gizadeathstar.com/)
PART 1: Q Anon – Deep State Wizard of OZ? DARK JOURNALIST AND DR. JOSEPH FARRELL – January 8th, 2018
Deep State Trial Balloon/Marketing Op Aimed at Alternative Media?
In this fascinating episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt welcomes back Oxford Scholar Dr. Joseph P. Farrell the author of the popular Giza Death Star Book Series. Farrell delves deeply into the online group posts of Q Anon and its rapid spread through the Alternative Media under the guise of an anonymous insider. Farrell Poses the question: Is the Q Anon material just the latest wave of sophisticated disinformation that Catherine Austin Fitts calls “Hope Porn”?
Disinformation Campaign?
Farrell sees a sophisticated disinformation campaign aimed at the independent research community to create an Imitation Wikileaks style vehicle that will act as an All-knowing Oracle Insider for a variety of important Geopolitical situations. It is apparently designed to propagate the promise of Cabal Arrests and Elites being tried at Gitmo as a kind of Soma to pacify the growing online audience that are raising questions about the actions of the Deep State on a global scale! Don’t miss this exciting, informative and alarming Dark Journalist episode!
Exciting, riveting, informative and loaded with amazing facts. Don’t miss this incredible Dark Journalist Episode!
I wish I could interrupt the mainstream train of thought and derail it in order to get someone to understand that it now can be declared the Russian meddling probes are a distraction from what is truly going on.
Now that we are being told by the President that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections, I am curious as what is to be done about it and how to we conclude that the Russia is an enemy and that Trump has committed an act of treason.
I want to say that the real enemy is the mainstream media who is now framing a dangerous narrative which is distracting us from what needs to be reported and investigated.
China is now moving its chess pieces as we are focusing on Russia and they are certainly being strident and no one is noticing.
When our DARPA whistleblower “Sam” called in to give us information about a possible attack on a diplomat during the Trump summit – he said that he believed the Chinese are responsible for using the secret Medusa weapon. A listener from Florida called the show to say that he was a Cuban who claimed to have been a witness to the mysterious cases of the diplomats who were victims of mind control and sonic torture.
He stated that he believed that the Chinese were involved in the Cuban, Chinese Embassy and Singapore Summit attacks.
Now new revelations again create a compelling conspiracy that needs to be addressed.
According to Patrick Tucker of Defense One, four days before U.S. and Russian leaders met in Helsinki, hackers from China launched a wave of brute-force attacks on internet-connected devices in Finland, seeking to gain control of gear that could collect audio or visual intelligence.
Traffic aimed at remote command-and-control features for Finnish internet-connected devices began to spike July 12, according to a July 19 report by Seattle-based cybersecurity company, F5.
Finland is not typically a top attacked country; it receives a small number of attacks on a regular basis,” the report says.
China generally originates the largest chunk of such attacks; in May, Chinese attacks accounted for 29 percent of the total. But as attacks began to spike on July 12, China’s share rose to 34 percent, the report said. Attacks jumped 2,800 percent.
The China-based hackers’ primary target was SSH (or Secure Shell) Port 22 — not a physical destination but a specific set of instructions for routing a message to the right destination when the message hits the server.
It’s the sort of attack that’s easier for actors with lots of human and computer power to throw at the problem, but hardly exclusive to them.
The attackers also heavily targeted Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, Port 5060, used by teleconferencing software and internet-based phone apps.
China wasn’t alone in trying to gain access to Helsinki’s internet-connected devices in the lead-up to the July 16 summit. Attack traffic came from the U.S., France, and Italy as well, in that order. But the U.S. and French traffic was in keeping with averages. Russian attack traffic dropped considerably from third, its usual spot, to fifth. German attack traffic jumped.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday evening, FBI director Christopher Wray commented that “China from a counterintelligence perspective represents the broadest, most pervasive, most threatening challenge we face as a country.”
We are focusing on Russia meddling when we should be keeping our eyes on China, which last time I checked is a Communist country.
The thing about writing a blog is that one never knows what an email will bring. After spending an inordinate amount of time in front of Toby, the ‘puter, yesterday learning how to insert diagrams, and then putting together the post in order to have something in which to insert them, I determined that today I would spend time with the Daniel Gormally book, Insanity, passion and addiction: a year inside the chess world, while playing over Chess games on an actual board with pieces one can feel, and possibly “working” on the openings intended for the Senior Championship of the Great State of South Carolina, which is only ten days away, by going to the CBDB and 365Chess. Wrong, Ke-mo sah-bee! An email from my friend Mulfish arrived at 11:42 am, upsetting the Bacon cart…
“Looking forward to the AWs take on AlphaZeros stunning win over Stockfish,” was the message. “What’s this?” I thought, wondering if Mike was referring to the TCEC Computer Chess Championship that is in the final stretch. “But Stockfish is not participating in the Super Final,” I thought. I therefore fired off an immediate response: “To what, exactly, are you referring?” His reply was, “Look in the all things Chess forum.”
Although there are not as many incoming as there were before taking a long break from blogging, I have received several emails directing my attention here and there, and they are greatly appreciated. Checking the AW stats today showed many people in countries other than the USA reading the AW. In particular I noticed that today, as every day, there is one, and only one, reader in the Maldives. Thank you, whoever you are, and feel free to send an email, as I am curious by nature.
Keep ’em coming: xpertchesslessons@yahoo.com
This is the post found on the USCF forum that prompted Mulfish to fire a salvo at the AW:
Postby billbrock on Wed Dec 06, 2017 9:16 am #321974
“AlphaZero learned to play chess by playing against itself. After just FOUR HOURS of self-learning, it was able to decisely (sic) defeat Stockfish 8.0! (EDIT: this statement is slightly misleading. See downthread.) (100 games match: +28 =72 -0)
What’s really impressive: Stockfish was calculating far more deeply than AlphaZero (at least in terms of nodes per second). AlphaZero is just “smarter.”
After reading only this I thought, “Whoa! This will change not only my day, but possibly the future course of history!” The more I read the more convinced was I of the latter.
Bill Brock provided a link to a PDF paper, Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf) which I read immediately, blowing my mind…
Every morning I read while drinking my first cuppa coffee, and today was no exception. Toby is not fired-up until time to sit down and eat breakfast. I check my email, then the quotes of the day, followed by the poem of the day, which was The Writer’s Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, but it has been discontinued, so I’ve moved on to Poem-a-Day (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem-day) & The Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/). Next I click on the Drudge Report in order to understand what the enemy is thinking, and doing. Then it is the newspapers in digital form, the NYT, WaPo, and AJC. For you readers outside the USA, that would be the New York Times, the Washinton Post, and the Atlanta Journal & Constitution. Then I check out the word of the day (https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day), before heading to check what was on the nightly radio programs broadcast while I am sleeping, Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis (http://www.groundzeromedia.org/), and the Granddaddy of them all, Coast to Coast AM (https://www.coasttocoastam.com/). You may think that Chess comes next, but you would be mistaken. I check out The Hardball Times at Fangraphs (https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/). Then I check out what’s happening in the world of Go (http://www.usgo.org/).
Then it is time for Chess! My routine is to check in at Chess24 (https://chess24.com/en) first in order to learn if there is a new article I will want to return to after checking out Chessbase (https://en.chessbase.com/), where there is usually something interesting to peruse. (Today is no exception because the lead article is, How XiangQi can improve your chess, which will be read. https://en.chessbase.com/). During the TCEC Championships it is then on to Chessdom (http://www.chessdom.com/), where I click onto TCEC (http://tcec.chessdom.com/). And then it is on to the Chess Granddaddy of them all website, TWIC, aka The Week In Chess (http://theweekinchess.com/), which is Mark Crowther’s wonderful website which contains a Daily Chess Puzzle, which I attempt to solve, in hopes it will keep my mind sharp. Why was I writing all this?…Just kidding!
The point is that I read so long this morning (Why Bob Dylan Matters, by Richard F. Thomas; Cover Me: The stories behind the GREATEST COVER SONGS of all time, by Ray Padgett, who has a wonderful website (http://www.covermesongs.com/); and Murder on the Death Star: The assassination of Kennedy and its relevance to the Trump era, by Pelle Neroth) in order to finish the latter. The point being that by the time I got to the email by Mulfish I would ordinarily have already seen the momentous news.
The excellent article by Colin McGourty begins: “20 years after DeepBlue defeated Garry Kasparov in a match, chess players have awoken to a new revolution. The AlphaZero algorithm developed by Google and DeepMind took just four hours of playing against itself to synthesise the chess knowledge of one and a half millennium and reach a level where it not only surpassed humans but crushed the reigning World Computer Champion Stockfish 28 wins to 0 in a 100-game match. All the brilliant stratagems and refinements that human programmers used to build chess engines have been outdone, and like Go players we can only marvel at a wholly new approach to the game.”
Colin ends with: “And where do traditional chess programmers go from here? Will they have to give up the refinements of human-tuned evaluation functions and all the existing techniques, or will the neural networks still require processing power and equipment not easily available? Will they be able to follow in DeepMind’s footsteps, or are there proprietary techniques involved that can’t easily be mastered?
There’s a lot to ponder, but for now the chess world has been shaken!”
“Shaken?” More like ROCKED TO ITS FOUNDATION!
If games people play are to survive they will be something like that described in the novel I consider the best I have read, Das Glasperlenspiel, or Magister Ludi, aka, The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse. (http://www.glassbeadgame.com/)
Or maybe a book, The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks, which is not only one of my favorite Sci-Fi books, but also one of my favorite book about games.
The stunning news also caused me to reflect on a Canadian Sci-Fi television program I watched, Continuum, in which mega-corporations dominate the world in the future as time-travelers fight one of the largest corporatocratic entities, SadTech, which sounds an awful lot like Google. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1954347/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_6)
The Brave New World is here. The Science Fiction books I read as a youngster are no longer fiction.
Clyde Lewis hosts the “Ground Zero” radio program. Clyde usually writes an accompanying article, which he posts on his website (http://www.groundzeromedia.org/). Clyde’s December 8, 2014 article is, “A MISSILE CALLED CHRIST.” The topic is, as Clyde writes, “The latest resolution by the US Congress calls for renewed political, and military support for Fascist and Neo-Nazi-sympathizing regime in Kiev, Ukraine, which will include:
US aid for Kiev regime to keep using its military against ethnic Russians in east Ukraine.
US funding for more weapons and military support in the Ukraine.
More US funding for foreign language, pro-US, and anti-Russian propaganda throughout Eastern Europe and in countries bordering Russia.
In all but name, this US resolution is preliminary declaration of war, moving Washington right up to the final step, which is a formal declaration of war. Based on its recent record of engaging in foreign conflicts, it is unlikely a final declaration will come, as the US has already set numerous precedents already by waging Wiemar-style undeclared wars, or by simply bypassing its domestic checks-and-balances by waging any war through NATO.
The US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved a document which strongly condemns Moscow’s actions against its neighbors, calling them a policy of aggression.
Passed with 411-10 votes, the resolution slams Russia’s “continuing political, economic, and military aggression” against Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova and the “continuing violation of their sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity.”
The resolution calls for Russia to stop supporting local militias in eastern Ukraine and for the cancellation of Crimea’s decision to join Russia. In addition, it calls on Moscow to withdraw its troops which the US claims are in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.
The House calls on President Barack Obama to provide Ukraine with defense equipment and training.
This secret war against Russia has slowly grown into a major problem that will face America in the future and may contribute to instabilities that have already been used as a smokescreen here in the homeland.”
If you are wondering what this has to do with chess…is chess not a war game? When it comes to war much has been written alluding to chess, such as the most famous statement of the cold war, given by Jeane Kirkpatrick in a speech given during the 1988 Barrick Lecture Series at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas “Russia is playing chess, while we are playing Monopoly. The only question is whether they will checkmate us before we bankrupt them.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Kirkpatrick#Political_views)
Could it be that the Great Game continues? Consider this from, “Putin in Ukraine: The game is poker, not chess,” by Jim Picht, Communities Digital News:
WASHINGTON, March 4, 2014 —”Russia’s President Putin has been called “delusional” and a “chess master,” accused of playing recklessly or brilliantly in Ukraine. House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Mich., told “Fox News Sunday” that “Putin is playing chess, and I think we’re playing marbles.”
The truth is that he’s neither delusional, brilliant, nor a great leader. He does, however, know which game he’s playing: The game is poker, not chess.” (http://www.commdiginews.com/politics-2/putin-in-ukraine-the-game-is-poker-not-chess-11536/#m9401FFEJbfBKS74.99)
Later Clyde writes, “Obama seems to be doing what both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt did during war time. Wilson was frustrated that Congress wouldn’t grant him unbridled power over natural resources, so he too invoked the powers given him under an executive order to assume absolute and unilateral authority much like what President Obama is doing now.
Barack Obama has been briefed and convinced that continued war or in his words “The Right War” will bring to the United States a better and more sound economy. He already has indicated through actions (similar to those of FDR against the Japanese) that he is more than capable of pushing a potential enemy into attacking us. Obama has taken the draconian measures of economic sanctions against Russia and has funneled money to neo-con traitors to make deals with neo-Nazis in order to destabilize the areas that Putin is stepping in to protect
Actually, the most famous chess quote of the cold war, and arguably the most famous of all-time, comes from President John F. Kennedy, who “…may have played chess. He received a very nice chess set as a birthday gift in 1962 from a very close friend. In a Cold War statement, referring to the USSR, he said, “We play poker, they play chess.” (http://www.chess.com/article/view/us-presidents-and-chess)
Armchair Warrior 